Hi there,
I'm getting started with dimension strings and Sibelius. I've done my reading/forum digging - I know the rationale behind sampling the harmonics 2 octaves up - It's completely wrong, IMO. An 'o' above a note would indicate the sounding pitch according to current notational convention (with Double Bass being an octave lower, as per the rest of the Double Bass part - Suono reale is greatly frowned upon by bassists) Composers wanting to specify artifical harmonics need to use the diamond at the required node, touch 4th, 5th, whatever. Natural harmonics that are to be played on the lower half of the string use these diamonds as well, to indicate the position of the fingered node, always with the string number indicated and often with the resultant sounding pitch indicated in parentheses and made cue sized.
I'd urge VSL to change the mapping of this in the Sibelius soundset/preset to reflect proper notational convention. It's much easier to simply enter resultant pitches in a second voice, and make the fundamental and the stopped note not play in the properties window than have to go through the tedious donkey work of changing each individual patch, which I understand is the current advice. I know all sorts of decisions are made with mapping to make the instruments more playable on the keyboard, but I'm assuming that most people using VSL with Sibelius aren't playing these patches in anyway.
However, in the meantime, and assuming that VSL will ignore me, I'm trying to get the individual patches to play down 2 octaves. I've got 2 questions:
1. Do I seriously have to go into each matrix and change each harmonic patch to play down 2 octaves invidually? With the violins alone that's over 100 individual patch changes once you've waded through each desk setting! And what about updates? Will all these thousands of individual changes be preserved? Surely it's easier to make the change at soundset level? Is there anything I can change within Sibelius? I've thought about changing the behaviour of the 'o' symbol to affect a 2 octave down transposition, but thought I'd see if anyone had any better ideas first.
2. It doesn't work anyway. I've entered -2 as a value for the octave in the advanced properties, the patch still resolutely plays back 2 octaves up from the written note. Can someone point me in the direction of some help?
Many thanks
Mike
